Critics have often described Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as a ‘watershed’ work, not only within his career and oeuvre, but also within the histories of music, art and ideas. However, the concept of the ‘watershed’ work needs to be understood both as an aesthetic construct and as a literary device that helps to shape a narrative of triumph over adversity. Investigating this concept means disentangling the Eroica from the many stories that have been told about it since Beethoven’s death. While modern critics have made compelling claims about the Eroica’s departures from generic and stylistic norms, for instance, these claims are complicated by close engagement with the music of Beethoven’s predecessors. Carl Friedrich Michaelis’s 1805 interpretation of the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven as ‘heroic epics’ ‘Heldengedichte’ offers further evidence that the Eroica reaffirmed and reimagined ‘rather than overturned’ an existing aesthetic paradigm. The Beethoven myth has strongly shaped the way the Eroica has been understood, so that beginning in the 1830s, the symphony’s extraordinary reputation has been closely bound up with the periodisation of Beethoven’s life and works. Recent scholarship on Beethoven’s ‘middle’ or ‘heroic’ period opens up alternate ways of thinking about the Eroica’s ‘watershed’ status.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, German intellectuals, including musicians and writers on music, gradually reconsidered the terms of neoclassical criticism, in particular sublimity and simplicity. At first, following French neoclassical poetics, they tended to seek sublimity in religious or ethical messages, presented as simply as possible. Thus, Gellert recommended that the poems in his Geistliche Oden und Lieder (1757) be sung to the accompaniment of well-known chorale tunes. He offered some mild criticism of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s moderately elaborate settings of his collection of religious poetry. By the end of the century, drawing increasingly on British models, Germans increasingly sought sublimity in large-scale, elaborate works, such as Bach’s Heilig. However, they did not let go of the neoclassical ideal or language of simplicity. Simplicity was seen to lie in the singular and striking effect, that is, in the mere fact of transport. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, critics such as Christian Friedrich Michaelis would take the idea that complex works could seem simple in their effects and use it to ground the new work aesthetic.